SJW Firing Squad at Santa Barbara City College

“When does the Left go too far?” 

--- Jordan Peterson

SJW Firing Squad at SBCC…

  

Editorials : The progressive decline of SBCC    

By Andy Caldwell         

 June 28, 2018 7:15 AM

Santa Barbara City College has three things going for it — namely, location, location, location. Other than that, it has become an official wasteland, an intellectual ghetto devoid of constructive dialogue and meaningful debate. That is, the college has finally rid itself of its one token conservative professor, making the transition to an ideologically uniform-social-justice-warrior boot camp complete. To wit, the college has bid adieu and good riddance to one Professor Mark McIntire.

Mr. McIntire initially figured something was amiss when, after having taught at the college for over 20 years, he got a call from the administration. They couldn't find his teaching credential. Of course, they didn't bother to inform him why they were looking for it in the first place, since he had to initially provide it to be hired. Nonetheless, they informed him he could no longer teach without it. As it turns out, Mr. McIntire was able to reproduce the credential in short order.

The second attempt to rid the college of his services came in the form of a negative evaluation of his performance by his new department head. Despite the fact that Mr. McIntire was teaching critical thinking skills, his new boss didn't like the fact that his students were having to think critically about "highly charged" subjects, such as gun control. God forbid the snowflake generation would have to consider both sides of a debate, on a college campus no less. Whereas Mr. McIntire may have been able to survive this ideological ambush, what came next served to provide the fatal head shot. To wit, the Shermer Incident.

Mr. McIntire invited a well-known and highly respected academic, Dr. Michael Shermer, to take part in a colloquium. Unbeknownst to these two professionals, a college chemistry professor, Raeanne Napoleon, decided to do a #MeToo search on Mr. Shermer. What she came up with was a four-year-old story about sexual harassment allegations that she decided to run with, by way of sabotaging attendance at the colloquium and defaming Mr. Shermer. She blasted out an email indicating that all the women on campus should be cautious about being alone with the visiting scholar after dark, and well, that did the trick.

As it turns out, Mr. Shermer's college of employment had already conducted an investigation into the allegations and dismissed the same. Santa Barbara City College decided that the chemistry professor's email blast was of no concern. However, when Mr. McIntire went to the defense of Dr. Shermer, well, things took a nasty turn indeed.

The chemistry professor and a couple other #MeToo sorority sisters on campus filed sexual harassment charges against Mr. McIntire. For what? True to form, the sisters claim to be the victims in all this. Simply because it was Mr. McIntire who called them sorority sisters and made fun of them by way of his standard fare of colorful and clever language. Ergo, based on words alone, they filed charges of sexual harassment. Mr. McIntire has since been cleared of the charges, but regardless, City College has informed him they will not rehire him for the next semester.

Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB and host of The Andy Caldwell Radio Show, weekdays from 3-5 p.m., on News-Press AM 1290.

Related: Defund, Dismantle, and Vanquish Cultural Marxism In Our Schools and Media

   

23 year veteran philosophy professor Mark McIntire 

How a Professor Who Lost His Job for Being Conservative Fought Back and Won

Troy Worden / October 19, 2018

A longtime conservative professor on a liberal college campus didn’t expect to face harassment claims, lose his job over his political beliefs, and then win a $120,000 settlement.

Mark McIntire, 74, taught philosophy as an adjunct professor at Santa Barbara City College in California for 23 years.

An old friend of Charlton Heston, the late actor and National Rifle Association president, McIntire is no stranger to controversy.

In an email to The Daily Signal, he recalled being elected to the national Screen Actors Guild Board of Directors in 1983 and leading a “successful … coup d’etat against [then-Guild] President Ed Asner to the outrage of Hollywood liberal- progressives.”

But until the election of President Donald Trump, McIntire, a faculty member in Santa Barbara City College’s  philosophy department since 1996, says he was just the school’s “token” conservative.

“For 23 years … it was a standing joke that we had one person on campus willing to speak his mind and contradict the reigning campus orthodoxy,” McIntire told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“In 2016, in the run-up to the election, every single campus lecture I attended … turned into a Hillary Clinton pep rally and a Donald Trump hate-fest,” he said, noting that was the case even when the lectures had nothing to do with politics.

Then, earlier this year, he suddenly found himself embroiled in the college’s free speech and #MeToo movements.

‘Oversharing’ Political Beliefs

When McIntire invited prominent atheist Michael Shermer to campus in March to speak about debunking beliefs in the afterlife and Utopian societies, one female educator at the college sent out a mass 
email to faculty.

In the email, the chairwoman of the chemistry department, Raeanne Napoleon, cited a Buzzfeed article reporting on past allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Shermer, including 
attempted groping and lewd behavior at scientific conferences, along with one public accusation of rape.

Even though Napoleon wrote that Shermer “still has the right to free speech,” she recommended that female faculty members and students avoid being alone with him.

Napoleon told Inside Higher Ed that she was inspired by the #MeToo movement to warn fellow faculty members about Shermer. She also wasn’t a fan of McIntire’s politics.

Napoleon said McIntire was well-known for “oversharing” his political beliefs through campus email, admitting to automatically marking his emails as trash in the past.

In response, McIntire came to Shermer’s defense in a series of private emails he sent to fellow educators, as well as in an article he wrote for the student newspaper.

Of Napoleon’s all-campus email, McIntire wrote in the student newspaper’s online comments section: “She succeeded only in fingering herself as a calumniator of the very worst stamp.”

McIntire also referred to a conciliatory e-mail sent to him by Napoleon as a “morning-after regret”of an email to another faculty member.

Complaints, Evaluations

Those comments—among others—got McIntire into trouble. Napoleon told Inside Higher Ed that his language was suspect in the context of the sexual assault allegations against Shermer.

Soon thereafter, four of McIntire’s female colleagues, including Napoleon, brought  harassment complaints against McIntire under Title IX, the federal law protecting individuals from discrimination based on sex at institutions that receive federal funds.

In May, the college sent McIntire a termination notice, owing to three negative teaching evaluations from philosophy department Chairman Marc Bobro.

In the teaching evaluations, Bobro wrote that the topics McIntire chose for term papers and exams were too “highly charged and politicized,” that his Facebook posts were inappropriate, and that he 
failed to grasp “basic philosophical concepts.”

“I never assigned topics,” McIntire wrote in an email to The Daily Signal. “I let the students assign the topics.”

Often, McIntire’s students would pick politically charged topics such as abortion, homosexual marriage, Black Lives Matter, extraterrestrial life, and transgenderism.

“In all my 23 years teaching at SBCC, I never had a student paper defending conservatism,” he said.

McIntire said it took several meetings with administrators for Bobro to acknowledge he was incorrect on that point.

‘Tribal Feminism’

In his second evaluation, Bobro wrote that he recommended that McIntire delete Facebook posts critical of other faculty members and transgender individuals, and “go to a diversity workshop on 
campus this school year.”

“My political ideas and expressions should never have been included in the teaching evaluations,” McIntire said.  “I teach philosophy, which is all about the examination of opposing views, dispassionately, in a civil environment.”

McIntire said he believes the negative teaching evaluations and harassment claims were rooted in a 
bias against his political beliefs:

I was fired because of a disease. The clinical name for this disease is ‘Acute Social Justice 
Warrior Campusitis.’

The particular pathogen on the SBCC campus is the #MeToo tribal feminism that fired me because I was the only faculty member with the grit to [publicly] defend opposing views of conservatives, 
Trump voters, religious, libertarian, and home-schooled individuals.

Bobro did not return calls or emails from The Daily Signal seeking comment.

After months of legal wrangling, McIntire and the college agreed to a $120,000 settlement. According to the student newspaper, The Channels, the decision was unanimous on the part of the 
college’s board of trustees, with  internal deliberations ending in a 6-0 vote Aug. 9.

McIntire said college documents will list him as having resigned Aug. 3, rather than not rehired or terminated. He told the student newspaper that the college expunged the three negative evaluations.

‘A Good Judge’

In an email to The Daily Signal, he said he has been “fully exonerated” in the four Title IX complaints.

Judge Elinor Reiner, hired by the college to investigate the complaints against McIntire, determined in her final report that the statements McIntire made to the female instructors did not 
rise to the level of violating Title IX law. But Reiner wrote that she did “find that a small number of the comments made by McIntire in his e-mails were gender-based in a purposefully 
disparaging fashion,” adding:

"While those comments reasonably could give rise to a belief among some female faculty that at times he was ‘anti-feminist,’ especially since they believed (erroneously) he never directed negative 
comments toward male faculty members, patently they were not ‘severe’ or ‘pervasive’ enough to demonstrate actionable harassment or bullying took place." McIntire said he is satisfied.

“I’m grateful that my name was cleared,” he said, adding that Reiner “clearly didn’t like the language I used … but she’s a good judge, and she came down on the side of the law, Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

The college did not respond before publication of this article to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for 
comment on the settlement.

Napoleon declined to comment in response to an email from The Daily Signal.

Troy Worden  is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.




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